Archive for the ‘News’ Category

So many voices have expressed their thoughts on Adobes new icons so far and one of the more noticeable one from users is that they all thought it was some temporary place holder art. When I first saw the splash screen and application icon of Adobe Photoshop CS3 my thinking pattern was that Macromedia had its influence in the branding process: the idea of using different colors for each application and the way the splash screen is organized.

The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. But who are the people driving this growth? All this week the BBC News website is speaking to young, talented web pioneers working in Silicon Valley and beyond.

When Jeremy Stoppelman was 14 years old he had a subscription to Forbes magazine and dabbled in the stock market.

His ambition was to one day run his own company and be featured in his magazine of choice. Fifteen years later and both goals have been accomplished.

Mr Stoppelman is the co-founder and chief executive of Yelp.com, easily the internet’s most sophisticated solution to finding local information and reliable reviews of services.

“I was a computer nerd but also investing in stocks in high school,” he says.

The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. But who are the people driving this growth? All this week the BBC News website is speaking to young, talented web pioneers working in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“When we put it out we did not know if anyone would like it; we just knew that it solved our problem,” explains Seth Sternberg, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Meebo.com.

The “it” in question is Meebo, a web-based instant messaging (IM) system which lets users send and receive messages from a number of different IM services, such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber.

It is an elegant solution to the problem of having multiple accounts – many of which are not interoperable – and requiring different software downloads.

The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. But who are the people driving this growth? All this week the BBC News website is speaking to young, talented web pioneers working in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Garrett Camp is a veteran of the web industry. The net discovery service StumbleUpon he and two friends founded in 2001 has more than two million registered users and his investors include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

But Camp is still only 28-years-old, and could easily pass as a fresh-faced young engineer at Yahoo or Google.

He runs a team of developers and engineers and oversees one of the most popular social networking tools on the web.

The idea behind StumbleUpon is simple.

“Click a button, find something cool was the very basic premise,” he says.

The web has evolved into an indispensable tool for our daily lives. But who are the people driving this growth? All this week the BBC News website is speaking to young, talented web pioneers working in Silicon Valley and beyond.

What do you do if you are a 17-year-old programming genius living in Seattle, in the US? Do you work for Microsoft, the largest software company in the world with billions of dollars in resources and a clear career path?

Or do you move away from your family, 800 miles south to San Francisco and single-handedly build a photo-sharing website that will eventually have 100,000 users around the world?

Kris Tate, a softly-spoken and impossibly polite teenager, did the latter.

Now 18 years old, Tate is the coding expert responsible for Zooomr, one of the most popular photo websites on the net.

Type in a phrase, and we not only expect it to find millions of relevant websites, but we also expect it to list the best or most important sites first.

Woe betide a search engine that requires me to click to page two of the results before I find the site I am looking for.

Generally they do a decent job but, up until very recently, if you were to search on the term “miserable failure”, top of the Google search results was the official George Bush page on the official White House site.

The album cover — once a crucial part of any band’s identity — has been dying a slow death for decades. For the most part, music fans put up with the shrinkage of album art from expansive vinyl records to hand-size plastic jewel cases. But with the music experience moving almost exclusively online, album art has suffered another compression — this time all the way down to thumbnail images. (Worse still — they’re missing from most of the music files we’ve all ripped and downloaded.)

The amount of money spent on internet advertising in the UK has overtaken the total advertising expenditure of national newspapers for the first time.The marketing milestone has been tracked by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and published in its biannual study today.

According to its findings, internet ad spend in the UK broke the £2 billion barrier last year, after a 41.2 per cent surge in growth. This compares to just 0.2 per cent increase for newspapers to £1.9 billion.

In partnership with Webby Title Sponsor, The Creative Group, we’ve released our 2007 Internet Trends Report. The Web 2.0 revolution has truly arrived and this trend report, penned by Webby Executive Director David-Michel Davies, will help you navigate the evolving media landscape. Download the full PDF now.